1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a computer system and, more particularly, to a computer system with a bridge.
2. Description of the Related Art
At present, Intel and Advanced Micro Device (AMD) are central processing unit (CPU) manufactures having the highest market shares. Taking a computer system with the Intel CPU as an example, the south bridge and the north bridge communicate with the peripheral device via a peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) bus, and data is transferred between the north bridge and the south bridge via a direct media interface (DMI) bus.
FIG. 1 and FIG. 2 are block diagrams showing a conventional computer system 100 and a conventional computer system 200. The computer system 100 and the computer system 200 include a main memory module 110, a CPU 120, a north bridge 130, a south bridge 140, and two slots 150 and 160, respectively. The CPU 120 is used for controlling the operations of the computer system 100 and the computer system 200, such as executing a software program, processing or calculating the data. The north bridge 130 is electrically connected to the main memory module 110 via a memory bus, it is electrically connected to the CPU 120 via a CPU bus, and it is electrically connected to the slot 150 via a PCIe bus. The slot 150 may insert a high speed expansion device (such as a graphic card), and the north bridge 130 controls the high speed communication between the main memory module 110, the CPU 120, an image sub-system, and the PCIe bus. The slot 160 may insert a low speed peripheral device (such as a hard disk control card, an universal serial bus (USB) control card, a 1394 control card, an optical disc drive (ODD), an audio card, a network card), and the peripheral device is electrically connected to the south bridge 140 via a PCIe bus. Then, the south bridge 140 processes the input and output function of the computer systems 100 and 200. On the other hand, the north bridge 130 includes a DMI output controller, and the south bridge 140 includes a DMI input controller. The data are transferred between the north bridge 130 and the south bridge 140 via four channels of the DMI bus.
In the conventional computer system 100, the slot 150 includes a group of PCIe x16 slots which may support a graphic card. After a display device (such as a screen) is connected to the graphic card, the images of the computer system 100 are outputted. In the conventional computer system 200, the slot 150 includes two PCIe x8 slots, which can support two graphic cards. With the parallel image processing method, the graphic processing per second of each graphic card can be added up, and thus the efficiency of the image processing system is improved.
However, in the present computer system, the image processing system performing advanced graphic calculations requires a higher speed, which cannot be met by the conventional computer systems 100 and 200.